Austin ISD gets a C under Texas’ updated school rating system

Austin ISD earned a C for the 2022-23 school year under the state’s academic accountability system. The C marks a slide from the previous year when the district earned a B before the Texas Education Agency started using more rigorous criteria to calculate school ratings.

Superintendent Matias Segura said Austin ISD and other school districts in Texas saw some “drastic swings” in the grades under the updated system.

“We have 30 schools identified as failing, 16 of which went from a B in 2022 to an F in 2023,” he said. “The one thing to keep in mind is that these are the same students and the same teachers from one year to the next.”

Austin ISD School Board President Lynn Boswell said there was a 233% increase in schools statewide that got an F under the updated rating system.

“This is not just happening in Austin ISD. This is a systemic reshaping of the yardstick that’s used to measure our state’s public schools,” she said. “Texas has changed the rules on the public schools that serve 5.5 million Texas students.”

School districts did not get their 2023 grades until Thursday because the TEA has been blocked from sharing them for the last two school years by a pair of lawsuits school districts filed challenging the validity of the ratings. Earlier this month, Texas’ 15th Court of Appeals sided with the TEA and ruled the agency could release the 2023 ratings. All of the judges on the recently created court were appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott. The lawsuit blocking the release of 2024 ratings is before the same appeals court and ongoing.

The A-F system is based on students’ performance on state standardized tests, whether schools are closing achievement gaps for certain demographic groups, graduation rates and students’ readiness for college, the workforce or the military.

Texas families, who can view school ratings at TXschools.gov, have not gotten complete grades since 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and lawsuits.

What do lower grades mean for Austin ISD? 

The most pressing example of what lower grades mean for Austin ISD is the decision the district is facing about Dobie Middle School.

The sudden release of the 2023 ratings means the Northeast Austin campus could receive several failing grades in rapid succession, putting the district at risk of state intervention.

Dobie got its second F in a row in 2023 and Austin ISD expects it to get an F under the 2024 ratings and another F when the 2025 ratings come out in August.

If the campus gets five consecutive failing grades, the TEA could replace the elected school board with a board of managers and choose a new superintendent — something the agency did with Houston ISD. To avoid this, Austin ISD must submit a plan to the TEA by June 30 to partner with a charter company to run the campus, close it permanently or close it temporarily and revamp it.

Superintendent Segura said Dobie might not be the only campus in this situation.

“One of the things that we’re navigating is this reality that within a four month span we could have three letter grades hit any one of these schools,” he said.

An increase in the number of schools that may require turnaround plans come as the district faces a $110 million budget deficit. That is especially challenging, Segura said, because improving failing campuses takes resources.

“And the dollars and the ability to pay for those resources is something we don’t have a lot of,” he said.

Boswell added that schools are facing higher standards, while state funding for public education has not kept up with inflation.

“As the state has higher expectations for our students, we need to continue advocating for more resources for our schools,” she said.

How did the new criteria affect schools’ grades?

School districts that signed onto the lawsuit challenging the 2023 ratings said they were not given adequate notice of the new criteria used to evaluate whether high schools were preparing students for life after graduation. Previously, 60% of graduating students had to be deemed career or college ready to get an A. In 2023, that increased to 88%.

The districts argued the updated system would make it appear that the schools were doing worse than they actually were.

Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath pushed back on this idea that schools received lower grades in 2023 because of the changes. He said scores in 2022 were higher because students made larger gains coming out of the pandemic.

“The student progress was very, very high in 2022. In 2023, growth became much more normal,” he said.

About 73% percent of campuses statewide got a passing grade in 2023. According to the TEA, if the updated criteria was applied in 2022, 85% of schools would have gotten a passing grade.

This story was produced as part of the Austin Monitor’s reporting partnership with KUT.

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